With the advancement of technology, there has been an expansion with the amount of information available to users. Improvements have been made in the flexibility and immediacy of information transfer such as, for example, between various entities (e.g., users) via electronic devices. In this regard, information may be easily stored and/or transferred between electronic devices. With the large amount of information available, there has been a demand for increased storage capacity in devices to accommodate the storing of the large amount of information. Although there have been efforts to develop electronic devices that meet the demand to store large amount of information, problems still remain in the performance of these electronic devices when large amount of information are stored thereon.
In this regard, when large numbers of files are stored in individual directories on a file system, such as for example the New Technology File System (NTFS) system, the architecture of the file system can create issues with performance that can negatively affect an application attempting to access the files. A content repository that can store large numbers of files does not efficiently distribute the files to prevent issues with the file system that affect its performance. For example, a large number of files are sometimes stored in a first directory whereas only a limited number of files are stored in a second directory. As such, access to files in the first directory may be time-consuming, limited and/or prevented. Moreover, with the physical limitations of current file systems, there is a requirement that multiple folders be used to hold the content for one logical folder. These issues have been recurring for many years.
One technique to at least partially address to this problem may be to show the folders of the system to the user. However, this approach may lead to confusion of the user and may not be in accordance with the manner of submission of the content item by the user. Another technique may be to attempt to create a threshold or limit to the maximum number of files allowed in any single directory. This technique may require establishing limits on files to be stored in any single directory, monitoring the file storage, defragmenting directories when files are moved or deleted, and/or restoring the directories to be in-sync following an instance in which the directories were out of sync. As such, this potential solution may require the use and/or allocation of a large amount of resources which negatively affect the performance of the file system.
Accordingly, there may be a need to develop a directory structure that is capable of storing a large number and amount of content items and dispersing the stored content items throughout the directory structure in an equitable manner to avoid a performance degradation of the file system.